Introduction To end the COVID-19 pandemic, the WHO set a goal in 2021 to fully vaccinate 70% of the global population by mid-2022. We projected the COVID-19 vaccination trajectory in 52 African countries and compared the projected to the ‘actual’ or ‘observed’ coverage as of December 2022. We also estimated the required vaccination speed needed to have attained the WHO 70% coverage target by December 2022.Methods We obtained publicly available, country-reported daily COVID-19 vaccination data, covering the initial 9 months following the deployment of vaccines. We used a deterministic compartmental Susceptible-Exposed-Infectious-Recovered-type model and fit the model to the number of COVID-19 cases and vaccination coverage in each African country using a Markov chain Monte Carlo approach within a Bayesian framework.Findings Only nine of the 52 African countries (Tunisia, Cabo Verde, Lesotho, Mozambique, Rwanda, Seychelles, Morocco, Botswana and Mauritius) were on track to achieve full COVID-19 vaccination coverage rates ranging from 72% to 97% by the end of December 2022, based on their progress after 9 months of vaccine deployment. Of the 52 countries, 26 (50%) achieved ‘actual’ or ‘observed’ vaccination coverage rates within ±10 percentage points of their projected vaccination coverage. Among the countries projected to achieve